


Hogwarts Prefers the Mongoose

by potionpen



Series: the Hogwarts' faculty mascot is a cobra [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bad Jokes, Badgers, Banter, Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Dolores don't care!, Gen, House Politics, Lions, Meme, Minerva wants to pettily gloat too dammit why should Slytherins have all the fun?, Severus tortures his students with slide shows, Snakes, Toads, Umbridge Bashing, clip-clop clip-clop, petty gloating, zoology is gross
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 05:24:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3557648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potionpen/pseuds/potionpen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...Yes, even Slytherin does.</p><p>At the end of OotP, Severus is not, in fact, gloating about Sirius's death. He has someone else's destruction to celebrate, and Minerva is with him all the way.</p><p>(All stories in this series can be read as one-shots)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hogwarts Prefers the Mongoose

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer** : Profitless fanwork
> 
>  **Warnings** : Zoology is occasionally kinda gross. Veiled references to non-consensual interspecies relations, although I PROMISE THERE AREN'T ANY. No centaurs were revolted in the making of this fic. Or any other animals, either.
> 
>  **Notes** : Apparently I can neither resist a bad joke nor simply let it happen without ten pages of academic politics and bantery griping, IDK.
> 
>  
> 
> This fic is about half-betaed. This is the fault of my brain, which smacked me upside the head with a plotbunny in the shower two days before I wanted to post something. Also the fault of Gmail, which apparently thought my invitation to beta was spam. And finally it is the fault of my poor beta's workplace, which by the time she finally got the email was already running her off her feet and continued to do so for several hours after post. I think we can call this yeoman work by psyche_girl in the face of accumulating technical difficulties.

"Well, Severus," Minerva said smugly, looking down at the broad, slack face which was twitching slightly on the hospital bed in front of her, "your Slytherins _will_ be disappointed."

"They'll be as relieved as everyone else," an unperturbed Severus replied. "In any case, most of them believe in the DADA curse. Do you think," he added, squinting critically at the row of bottles in front of him, "I could get away with adding a drop of nettle juice to her Dreamless Sleep? We could tell her it was an old batch that must have lost its efficacy."

"I'll do it," Minerva decided, holding out her hand. "She never got around to putting me on probation."

"It was because you let her stand above you on the stairs," opined her colleague as she delicately applied the eyedropper, smirking in a fashion that Minerva decided to take as an accolade with acacia blossoms and sage and chastely admiring poetry. "And gasped like a fainting auntie. And because she wanted no part of your in-tray."

"It was because she assumed it was Sybil putting powdered bubotuber pus in her tea sugar," Minerva corrected him.

"Ah," Severus said, enlightened. "That explains why she never erupted over the tentacula venom I had the elves wash her sheets with; she must have attributed the effect to the tea."

"Severus!" she exclaimed, appalled. "You involved the elves?"

"They volunteered!" he said defensively. "I told them what to do if she complained! Besides, just because _she_ says she's Headmistress doesn't mean the castle agrees and they've accepted her as their Head of Household."

"The Ministry said she was, too," Minerva pointed out.

"The school predates the Ministry," Severus said flatly. "And far predates the Board of Governors, for that matter. Hasn't anyone but me read Hogwarts: a History?"

"I know someone who has," Minerva informed him brightly.

" _That is taken as read,_ " Severus said darkly. "In any case, nothing counts as having been read by Miss Granger unless she can paraphrase it in a way that shows understanding."

"And yet her essays are more legible than the last ones of that length that crossed my desk," Minerva noted innocently.

Severus glowered at her. "Hogwarts predates the Ministry _,_ " he repeated with his most pointed emphasis, "and she wasn't built to be interested in what a drove of baby-kissing blowhards down in London want. Umbridge could have teamed up with your precious little prefect who's going to get herself in enormous trouble someday soon if she doesn't stop relying on her photographic memory—"

Minerva sighed. She wondered whether Severus would be less of a pain about every single student in the school if Albus gave in and let him have DADA so he could yell at them directly about all the ways they were terrifying their parents.

"—And given the elves all the clothes in Gladrags—"

"Oh, is that where you get your frock coats?"

He glared more. " _All the clothes in the store of your choice_ and it wouldn't have done anything but provoke them to use her suite as a dustbin and suggest to Peeves that he make it his new bedroom."

"Hmph." Despite the appeal of this image, she gave him the fish-eye until he returned her the sneer he resorted to when he wanted to stick out his tongue. It did no one any good to encourage him when he took a hyperbolic turn. "In any case, you may claim they'll be disappointed, but I must say that, given how quick they were to support her…"

"Correction," Severus said, offended. "They were quick to avoid getting on her bad side, because I explained they'd have to be. Most of their parents are either employed by the Ministry at positions they do not wish to lose or on the Highly Suspicious To The Populace As A Baseline Due To Being Slytherin list."

Minerva sighed at him.

He gave her a you-know-it's-true look and finished, "They were reasonably-paced to support her because they're not blind and could see which way the wind was blowing. To wit, that she was steamrollering towards paranoid megalomania and would soon take even neutrality as an affront."

"How did _you_ know?" she asked, a little affronted.

"Well, there was her charming thanks-for-having-me-I-appreciate-your-hospitality-and-the-honor-of-the-invitation speech," Severus noted, the side of his mouth kicking up.

"I grant you she showed her hand there," protested Minerva, "but that didn't mean she was going to be _effective_."

Severus muttered something about bloody Albus and his bloody opportunistic puppeteering martyrdom.

"What do you mean?"

He scowled at her. "Well, obviously he decided he wasn't getting anything done fending her off all the time and thought he might as well knock off two Chasers with one Bludger. He's been remarkably close-lipped about the research he did while he was away. Then, even if Fudge hadn't been mortally embarrassed by the Dark Lord showing his face, he would have been bombarded by the owls of everyone related to… call it eleven twelfths of the school. And I do mean by their owls, not by letters, in most cases, although the people he generally listens to would have made their displeasure clear in more subtle ways. I don't care if she tucks him to sleep every night with a bottle of warm milk and stands behind him with a pitchfork to his back, he'd never have stood up to that much political pressure. Not Neil Fudge."

"…Probably not," she conceded.

He nodded with a brief grimace. "No, she wasn't going to stay long. Then Albus would have re-hired anyone who hadn't lasted the year, and we would have had a Minister that admits there's a real threat again. One way or another. I suppose Sybil _might_ have had a problem if Umbridge had remembered she existed after 'defeating' the Headmaster, but the sort of sherry she drinks is quite inexpensive and the Hog's Head would have been quite safe for her, whether or not she enjoyed it. Umbridge would have thought that enough humiliation to be going on with, and Aberforth Dumbledore is not without resource."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "You two can be rather worrying at times, did you know?"

He leveled a gloomy you-only-visit-my-brain-I-have-to-live-here stare at her.

"Still, I have difficulty believing you got all that from Dumbledore's allowing her to speak uninterrupted." It wasn't quite an accusation, but 'skeptical' would have been an understatement.

"I did have some previous knowledge," he admitted.

"Malfoy?"

He smirked a little. "Not primarily, although he and Narcissa do call her a 'really delightful woman' with a very _particular_ bland intonation. No, anyone who knows anything about the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures knows about Dolores Umbridge, so anyone who's had much to do with the Wolfsbane Potion does as well. She's always had a disgust for things that look a bit like wizards and aren't, and been quite willing to arm-wrestle anyone who's got in the way of her trying to, er, purify the citizenry."

He looked at Umbridge clinically, with particular attention to her arms, and amended, "Metaphorically speaking."

He went on looking a little longer and then, with an expression of dark glee that barely flickered behind his eyes, cupped his hands and clapped them together in a cantering rhythm. She twitched and whimpered. With vindictive satisfaction, he informed her unconscious form, "That's for making my children blow up their carefully-maintained reputations to keep their families safe from you, harridan."

Minerva very nearly said _Really, Severus_. It was what she ought to say, but the trouble was that he'd know she was only jealous because he could get away with that kind of pettiness without much affecting his reputation. "What do you think they did to her?" was what she settled for.

"Well," Severus said, still glittering with awful cheerfulness, "she's acting violated, but centaurs are hardly satyrs and they think even the fittest humans look mutilated, as well as offputtingly bald in the trouser regions. Body-baldness in centaurs is a sign of disease. And she wasn't badly hurt. Personally, I'm hoping they held her down and licked her face."

He considered her a bit more and added, "A lot. And then lectured her on the impossibility of diverging planetary bodies from their appointed rounds for several hours and the inadvisability of attempting to do so. With detailed reference to what happens to those who get in the way of grindingly irresistible forces and breaks to snuffle at her hair and chew on her Alice band."

Now Minerva did say, "Really, Severus!" She was hard-put-to not to laugh, though, so there was no hope of him being properly shamed by it. Giving up, she asked, "But when did you tell them? The children, I mean. It must have been quite early on or she would have found out."

"She wasn't that good," he said disdainfully, but conceded, "but yes. I don't know if you're aware, but some of us take our Head of House duties seriously—"

" _Severus…_ "

"And take the time to ensure our students don't fail all their OWLs…"

"You know I don't have time for all those… little workshops you and Pomona hold," she said crossly.

"Do you imagine I do?"

"The amount of paperwork on my desk did not significantly diminish in size when Albus came back, I'll remind you. If anything—"

"But we have approximately the same amount of marking to do, you don't have to prepare ingredients before your classes or sterilize your equipment, and I'll be delighted to compare night-rounds schedules any time you care to. Oh, wait. You draw up all the schedules."

"You don't have any more rounds than you volunteered for, Severus Snape."

"If anyone else took them seriously and did them competently and without migraine-inducing amounts of whinging about how much work they have to do, to which I fully expect you to join me in replying, 'ahahahahaha…'"

"Stipulated," she agreed, rolling her eyes.

"Well, _someone_ has to do them. And you don't see _me_ sacrificing my duty just to get a sane amount of sleep."

"Enjoy your youth while you have it, my lad. _I_ hold office hours! One can't design even an informal syllabus while balancing the books, as I'd be _delighted_ to let you find out any time you like, and I _know_ you plot while you're doing night rounds. Don't think I haven't heard you cackling under your breath in the halls in the dark!"

"Does anyone ever join you in your office during your office hours without being sent for and, indeed, dragged kicking and screaming by the back of the collar?"

"On occasion," she insisted valiantly, because barely-true was still true. "And the nice thing about office hours is that _all_ students are welcome."

"And the nice thing about mandatory biweekly House meetings are that everyone in the House attends and reaps the benefit," he retorted with an expression suggesting that, had he been Charity Burbage, he would have been licking a finger and drawing a score-mark in the air with it. Possibly while making a victorious little _tsssss_ noise between his teeth. "Even the dullest at least gathers from them that the adult in charge of them is actively monitoring their studies and behavior."

"Filius doesn't—"

"Filius's students know that intellectual pursuits are their _hallmark,_ and he does his marking in the common room in fellowship with them, where they can see him at it and come up for help whenever they like." He was giving her the lowering, disappointed eyebrows. Again.

She sighed. They'd been having this argument for at least six years, and she suspected he'd only held off that long due to unease about his place at Hogwarts. "But what did you tell them?" she asked, hoping that the opportunity to brag combined with the impression that he'd won again (although, as smacking the reproachful look off his face wasn't worth never sleeping again, or letting either the school or her classes go to wrack and ruin, she had no intention of altering her schedule) would distract him. Slytherin or not, he was, after all, a man.

"I didn't _tell_ them anything, exactly," he said, reverting to smug on cue. She didn't mind if he was patronizingly telling himself he was letting her get away with it, as long as he did let her.

" _Severus…_ "

"Well, I'll show you, if you like," he said with the sort of magnanimity that explained very explicitly that he knew she wanted to strangle him and that was, in fact, the entire point. With a glint in his eye, he instructed, "Walk this way." Heading for the door, he left on soft feet, clip-clopping his hands together. Umbridge cringed in her sleep.

Minerva glanced left and right, making sure that not only was Poppy nowhere to be seen but Dilys Derwent and the other portraits were at least pretending to be asleep. They were. With the utmost dignity, she followed suit.

Behind her, someone burst out in incredulous laughter. She lifted her chin higher and kept clopping.

He took her through his common room. All the Slytherins looked at her in careful, politely respectful alarm—except for one third-year boy who threw himself bodily across the parchment and pile of books he'd been working on. Severus frowned at him and said, "That'll be twenty House points for the _implosive failure of stealth,_ Mr. Macready."

Minerva thought she probably ought to investigate that, but it wasn't her jurisdiction. " _House_ points?" she asked instead, raising her eyebrow.

It didn't sound quite as if he'd meant 'points from the House,' she'd thought. They didn't generally put it like that, and he certainly didn't usually take points from Slytherin in front of her. She knew he did it, although only in private and only if detentions and massive servings of loud shouting were failing to get through. The points math had been much less complicated before he'd shown up—but, to be fair, it was really that it had been much less complicated before he'd shown up _in 1970_ , at which point he'd been more of a catalyst than an instigator. Which was no longer the case.

"It wasn't an offense against school rules," he explained, adding with a frown to Macready, "although it may in fact turn out to be and would then be addressed as such. It was a failure to Slytherin."

"…Is 'Slytherin' a verb, Professor Snape?"

He ignored that. Haughtily. "He's just lowered his chances of being invited to a tea with Horace Slughorn over the hols—"

"Good heavens." That certainly explained why Severus's Slytherins were nearly as successful in getting brilliant placements as Horace's had been. She'd never understood how someone as violently opposed to schmoozing as Severus had been managing to trail Horace's track record so closely, even if most of his students did have well-placed parents to help them.

"Oh, Master Slughorn is effusively pleased to participate in the program, Professor," he assured her unnecessarily. Of course Horace would be. "It was the only part of the job he really hated to give up, after all."

"I can quite see that," she agreed, smiling approvingly.

He flushed very slightly and hastened on in a boring voice. It was actually a quite stultifying voice, almost Binns-like but more soothing. She wondered whether he'd learn to take a compliment by his centennial. "He's also lowered his year's chances for the end-of-year prizes."

Several of the other third-years had become unable to stop themselves giving Macready cool glances. The boy looked back at them all, offended and meaningful. Minerva assumed that meant his dive had been a diversion from someone else's mischief.

"All right," Severus allowed judiciously, "I'll give you five points back for a reasonable attempt to salvage the situation, and two more for succeeding at confusing your target audience. But I trust you realize _I_ will be investigating you, your seatmates, and everyone on the other side of the room. To begin with."

"Yes, sir," Macready said miserably. The glares had, to put it mildly, not abated.

"What are the end-of-year prizes?" she asked, feeling rather sorry for Macready. She was tempted to offer him a nonexistent Gryffindor point if it turned out he really had thrown himself over the cauldron to cover for a friend, but of course he'd only have been insulted.

"First, second, and third choice of invitations to Master Slughorn's Lammas party, which in defiance of tradition he generally has at the shore, an afternoon of what Lucius Malfoy _will_ insist on calling," his nostrils flared a little, "'money and mare management,' though _I_ call it 'financial self-defense and horse-flying lessons,' and one of the volumes of Salazar Slytherin's diaries and letters. I think it's letters this year. I have a deal with Obscurus books; they may not be actually first editions but they wouldn't embarrass any collector."

Half the room sighed longingly. The other half had sighed about the party. Blaise Zabini was giving Draco Malfoy a look that suggested he, Blaise, was going to get an afternoon of galleons and Abraxans, whatever happened, or Draco was going to wake up one day with his nose sewn to his coccyx with leather cord.

She decided not to ask Severus when, exactly, he'd given up on the House Cup. Everyone knew, anyway. "Those are quite good prizes."

"They got better a few years ago," he said coolly. Although the younger students didn't seem to be affected by this comment, the top three years, without changing expression, were suddenly exuding an air of ugly resentment.

"I think it's a very good program, Professor," she said stoutly. If only because Slytherins competing with each other would have less emotional energy with which to obsess over non-purebloods and Gryffindors, which was possibly why Severus had begun it in the first place. "I might institute something similar myself if my students would be collectively tempted by anything that wouldn't drive Filch to suicide."

This won her some softening. There were even some snickers, and Severus silently awarded her what she assumed was a Slytherin point with his eyebrows. He said, though, "You could always take them to Fortesque's or a match between, say, the Cannons and Tornados. That shouldn't break the bank."

"It would if they broke the stadium," she said dryly.

Severus looked slightly alarmed. "The Weasley twins would be out of the running, now, you wouldn't have to take them," he said smoothly, and just a beat too hastily ushered her down a set of stairs off to the left and into a cavernous room with stone walls covered in tapestries. It was full of armchairs and couches and poufs, but in a few places she could see where there had been chains on the walls once.

"What's the matter?" she asked, when he'd closed the door behind them.

"It unnerves them to hear a guardian insult her charges to others," he explained, shrugging a little. "They understand teasing, of course, but there has to be a very strong underlying layer of confidence, self-esteem, and trust in a relationship before an adolescent can have faith that affectionate abuse is made of pride, not mockery. Everyone's been having a difficult few years, of course, but… ours have been different. They think you meant it."

"I did mean it," she said, frowning.

"Yes, but what my students _heard,_ Minerva, is that you don't care about yours."

"That's absurd!"

"Our difficult-last-few-years have been different from yours," he repeated, his mouth tight. "They've had an effect."

She sighed. Slytherin had had a chip on its shoulder and a sense of grievance or entitlement, depending on the student, even when Horace was running it. There was no use trying to argue Severus out of it. "I don't think I've been in here before," she changed the subject.

"They call our area 'the dungeons,' but this actually was one," he said. "Or, at least, it was during the witch-hunting times. I don't think any spies actually made it into Hogwarts, though some got through to the Ministry—"

"That's why they moved to Whitehall, isn't it?"

He nodded. "Partially; Guy Fawkes rather worried them. They weren't the target of his conspiracy, but he made them realize they didn't understand Muggle weapons."

"I suppose it's just as well. Imagine what they'd think of themselves if they were still at Westminster!"

"I don't know," Severus said thoughtfully. "If they thought they were aristocrats rather than elected officials, we might suffer less from their nerves."

"But they'd think they could do as they pleased," she reminded him tartly.

He snorted. "They already do, they just understand the value of doing it behind closed doors and dressing it up in language that suggests they're doing grand things instead."

"Well," Minerva acceded with a shrug. It didn't surprise her in the least that Albus, who had a fine sense of self-preservation even if he neither needed nor cared to exercise it much, had run screaming from all suggestions he allow himself to be nominated as Minister for Magic. "And do you do grand things in here?"

"Hardly," Severus said dryly. "I show them home movies."

She did a double take.

He grinned the grin that came out as a smirk because he was a young idiot who wouldn't let himself grin. "An oversimplification, I admit," he allowed, still smirking. "We have Social Defense and last-resort Care of Magical Creatures lessons in here. Please don't tell Hagrid."

"…Severus, what have you done?"

He opened his hands resignedly. "You know he hasn't the confidence for teaching, Minerva. He lets the students' opinions upend his curricula. All his classes were doing flobberworms for the better part of a year. For Circe's sake, he even tried to get away with it with the NEWT year until they revolted. Some of my students will have estates to run when they inherit.  Estates with working farms and often commercial creature-breeding programs. They _need_ that NEWT."

She sighed. "Go on."

"I had a talk with Silvanus Kettleburn and he gave me some materials," he said with a shrug. "And he doesn't mind taking their owls when they have questions I can't answer, though I did take a NEWT in the subject and anyone who gathers his own ingredients has to keep up with the field to some degree. I do tell them to ask Hagrid first, but some of them simply won't trust or respect him for one reason or another, even when I tell them he's knowledgeable and quite enthusiastic when given the least encouragement."

"I wonder why they wouldn't respect him," she said, dry in her turn.

"Draco Malfoy's hardly the only one who's been raised to be a godawful snob," he sighed. "It's only that he's also been dropped on the head by a house elf two or three times too often and gotten his discretion button jammed on Loudly Broken."

"You must be at your wit's end," she noted, still dry. "Imagine a young Slytherin who communicates his opinions loudly. I'm sure no faces at all come to mind when I think of that utter impossibility."

He scowled at her. "Slughorn tried using subtlety in his modeling behavior and I've _lived_ what comes of that," he said reproachfully. Defensively, really, but she decided to be generous. "I've come to the conclusion that the lower years need everything spelled out for them, slowly, so they can learn the rules before they ruin their lives failing to put them into practice. But regarding Hagrid, I think for most of them it was the flobberworms and the screwts, really."

Minerva shuddered delicately. _Screwts._ How Albus had kept Hagrid from being hauled back to Azkaban for unauthorized breeding had been beyond her even before that Rita Skeeter menace found out about them. "Fair enough."

"Have a seat, then," he said, sending most of the chairs to line the sides of the room with a flick of his wand.

Minerva, who'd had both the 'foolish wand-waving' and the 'silly incantations' speeches quoted at her before in many quite different shades of horrified, wondered if any of the Slytherins had ever dared to call him on them. He did, at least, seem to genuinely prefer to cast silently, but really he was almost as quick to flick as Filius.

Of the two chairs remaining in the middle of the room, one was a low-backed, barely padded affair, very like the one she kept in her office. The other was behind a small table. It could have been taken from the common room upstairs, except that it appeared to be tilted very slightly forwards. Severus tapped his wand to the little table and went off to a large cabinet at the back of the room.

Out of the table's smooth surface unfolded what looked like one of Dumbledore's silver contraptions, though it had been painted Slytherin green. Minerva sat uneasily in the other chair, and asked, "What's that?"

"Filius made it for me, years ago," he said, sounding very nearly happy as he pored over the rows of folders and binders. "And one for himself, of course. I don't think the patent has come in yet, but what can you expect of the Ludicrous Patents Office. The design is similar to a muggle slide projector—have you had one of those inflicted on you?"

"Once," she threatened.

He looked wicked, but didn't reply directly. "This runs on magic, of course, and it shows Wizarding pictures. I couldn't get those to work just using the page-to-blackboard spell. I think the potion they're developed in interferes, although I admit I haven't tested the premise by any means exhaustively."

Minerva made a noncommittal face. She'd never thought to try that. It might be useful for her NEWT classes, when she needed to persuade them that human transfiguration was dangerous. "Hm."

"Ah, here we are." He came back with a folder and sat down. With another two turns of his wrist, the lights dimmed and the enormous tapestry taking up most of the wall at the front of the room, which had been showing what Minerva thought was Odysseus's much beleaguered Penelope at her weaving, surrounded by armed and avid suitors, turned white.

She heard him move beside her, there was a papery rustle, and a picture of a red-spotted toad, blinking complacently on a rock, appeared on the white tapestry. "Oh, I do beg your pardon," Severus said in a tone that meant the next thing that would come out of his mouth was a lie and he wanted her to know it. "Pink toads aren't at all the subject of this lecture, I can't imagine how this picture got in, how vexing. I suppose it only goes to show you can't tell a bean's taste by the color."

"…Right," Minerva said slowly, amused.

"This," Severus told her, changing the picture, "is a ratel. Do you know them?"

The animal was splayed out over parched grass as if it was dead, except that it was clutching a limp and savaged cobra like a teddy bear. "I can't say I do," she said, still slowly but now somewhat alarmed. The creature looked like a cross between a cat, a skunk, and a hyena.

"You're likely happier that way," Severus informed her. "Still, they have much to be said for them, at least by Hagrid. Decidedly one of his 'interesting creatures.' This one, for example, had been bitten by that cobra several hours ago. Watch."

The creature got up, shook himself (it was definitely a him), and wandered off, dragging the snake along in its mouth.

"Its magic," Severus said, changing the picture so that she saw a similar animal eating its way through a beehive, totally disregarding the swarm of angry bees trying to sting it to death, "lies in its indefatigability in combat and resistance to venoms of all sorts.

"It's also," he added, showing a picture of the creature chasing a rangy adolescent lion away from a dead gazelle, "quite fearless, and will do without hesitation that which other animals of its… stature… would never dare. It will take on anything, will ruthlessly take advantage should its quarry shrink or fly from direct confrontation, and any who do try to oppose it directly will find themselves brutally overwhelmed. This is of course not a magical property, nor is the looseness of its skin, which grants it mobility and makes it most difficult to pierce or be taken in a fatal or even very damaging hold. Nonetheless, in certain potions…"

Minerva tuned out his potions-lecturing voice as ratels tangled with wolverines, cracked open tortoises with their teeth, jumped on birds, ate jackels, disemboweled porcupines, and in one case very nearly shredded a black snake before chewing on it like a large stick of salt beef or melting rock. It was horrific and nauseating and impossible to look away from.

"Of course," Severus said blandly, "like most animals, the ratel rarely attacks humans unless provoked, although it will eat human carrion." She had to look away from that one, and decided to have a little talk with the elves about what meals would contain for the next few weeks. End of term feast or not, if she had to look at any meat in the near future she would end them.

"In fact, like some serpents and its muggle cousin, the skunk, while the ratel is of course a most ferocious predator, when it feels threatened itself, it is at least as likely to resort to a long-distance defense as to fly at its at attacker and overtly eat its face off."

She looked at him incredulously.

"Very similar to the skunk, in fact," Severus said, clearly enjoying himself, "though as smell is the skunk's primary defense, it is somewhat more adept at dispensing it. The ratel does not spray over a wide area, but its defensive odor is arguably worse. It has been likened to burnt skunk and called suffocating. Opinions are divided on whether magical paralysis of the throat occurs or the lungs in their entirety simply reject the option of allowing ratel-scented air into their premises. Suffice it to say that Zonko's stink pellets are derived from the anal gland of the ratel."

She stared at him in horror. The number that had been set off in this castle… some in her office…

"Much diluted," he added, as if remarking on the weather.

Minerva managed not to choke out loud. She was going to—well, if she couldn't take points off the Weasley twins anymore, she'd just have to write their mother.

"Would you care to summarize the lesson, Professor?" Severus asked, all innocence.

Firmly, she answered, "I may never eat again."

Caught off guard, Severus let out half a snort before forcing himself into a more dignified smirk. "Precisely," he said.

The picture changed to a four-square of an otter, badger, wolverine, and weasel, with a picture of a ratel nested in the center.

"Or," Severus said, "in other words: the badger has a good reputation in this castle, but it is a carnivore and a member of the Mustelidae family. Do not underestimate the Mustelidae. Otters are clever, weasels are flexible burrowers, wolverines have a 95% kill rate, the badger itself is tediously indomitable."

He tapped the ratel in the center of the picture. It was cracking open another tortoise, and there were the remains of another (very large) viper stretched out next to it. "And the honey badger takes what it wants. Bother, I seem to have put that picture of the toad in at the back again; I really can't imagine how it keeps getting in there."

**Author's Note:**

>  **Notes** :  
> In the language of flowers, meanings for acacia include friendship, chaste love, and elegance.  
> Sage mostly means esteem.
> 
> In my headcanon, a degree of Master of Brewing/Potions is distinct from a role as a school's Potions Master. Slughorn isn't accredited as highly as Severus, but he does have a degree (if it is, in Severus's estimation, from a Distinctly Inferior Institution) and Severus would no more dream of calling a former Hogwarts professor by a title like Mister than he would a former military general.  
> DADA temps don't count.  
> Especially not Lockhart.
> 
> The ratel is, indeed, another muggle name for the honey badger. Don't say honey badger don't care, honey badger cares a LOT, IT WILL PREVAIL!


End file.
